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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
The top story is Kevin Warsh has been selected by Donald Trump as the next Fed chair, and he still needs to go through some senate confirmation, but it's looking really good, and so everyone's doing deep dives on Kevin Warsh. Many people weren't familiar with him, so we wrote a little write up in the newsletter, tbpn.com. He's the new Jerome Powell. He's the new hand on the printing press, but he might be running them a bit quieter. He actually said if the printing press could be quiet, we could have lower policy rates.
Speaker 1:You can think about many different Fed policies, expansion of the balance sheet. They're buying more treasuries. They're buying more government debt. They're creating money. They're expanding the monetary supply, expanding the money supply, creating more currency.
Speaker 1:Right? Why are you laughing?
Speaker 2:They're printing money
Speaker 1:out printing money thin No. They really are printing out money out of thin air. But they also do have the ability to destroy money. They also have a furnace that they can pour money into. No.
Speaker 1:No. No. This is this is the wharsh platform. Are you anti wharsh?
Speaker 2:No. I'm I'm just
Speaker 1:You're washed up. Looks like I
Speaker 3:not only have twelve years of experience in government and six at the Fed, I've got some knowledge of Fed history. What the Fed needs is Yeah. More robust discussion of ideas, less group think. I don't like it that everyone's following the same model.
Speaker 1:I actually don't know this song. We're fans. We're fans. We had a lot
Speaker 2:of fun with that this morning. Probably Michael Michael started cooking. I came in with with some ideas.
Speaker 1:Warsh has a complicated history with what are you laughing at now?
Speaker 2:I just think that video combines all of my interests.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:It's it's a perfect encapsulation.
Speaker 1:That's great. He was actually complimented by Donald Trump as having like like great looks or something like that, which is a very funny comment. And Trump also, at one point, said like he's he's very youthful, but he couldn't get his name right. There's a bunch of funny things we'll dig into. But so he has a complicated history with Jerome Powell.
Speaker 1:It's very friendly. He never gauges engages an ad hominem. But they are competitive in terms of the roles that they could potentially fill, and they do have policy disagreements. Warsh was a finalist for Fed chair in 2017, during the first Trump administration. It was between Jerome Powell, Kevin Worsch, and a couple others.
Speaker 1:And at the time, treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin went with Powell or endorsed Powell. And it's potentially that Worsch's relative youth was a factor. He was just barely over 47 at the time, which is funny because it seems like very mature. Like, you know, you're certainly old to have a serious job. After 09:11, you know, this was kind of a formative moment for him because he was in Wall Street.
Speaker 1:Now Morgan Stanley at the time was in Times Square, so that building was unaffected, there were Morgan Stanley employees in the towers. And he sort of sees, according to some reporting, that as like a call to action to go work with the government, work for the government. So he joins. He moves to DC, gets involved in politics 2002, and he joins the Fed in 2006 at 35. And he was the youngest governor in the Fed's history.
Speaker 1:So and it was a crazy, crazy time to join because in '20 in 2006, you're like, everything's going great. People are buying houses. People are buying third houses, fourth houses, fifth houses.
Speaker 2:Could be better.
Speaker 1:They don't have employment. They don't have income. They don't have assets, but they're still able to buy houses. It's amazing. What could go wrong?
Speaker 1:And, of course, it went terribly, terribly wrong. There was a massive global financial crisis, and there were tons of emergency interventions. A lot of them were inventions of the time. There were a lot of novel solutions. Ben Bernanke was leading the country through the crisis along with Tim Geithner quantitative easing, money printing, bringing liquidity to markets that had completely seized up, like the money markets had seized.
Speaker 1:There were lots of markets that were just not moving, and basically every bank was going to go bankrupt or shut down if something wasn't done. So of course, the Fed opens the discount window, allows money to be lent to the banks, and then the banks can continue to do business. He was involved in a bunch of different aspects of that that we can go into. He actually got an ethics waiver to go and advise Morgan Stanley because he formerly worked there. So there's a worry about, okay, well, are you still buddies with these guys?
Speaker 1:Like, you gonna give them, like, extra help? But they were like, no. You're straight up. You're a good guy, and we trust you. And, really, like, you've been working in the government for almost a decade at this point.
Speaker 1:Like you're probably not really trying to put the thumb on the scale towards Morgan So he helps with Morgan Stanley. He helps with Goldman Sachs. He actually worked on two unsuccessful mergers that were proposed at the time. BofA merged with Merrill Lynch. There were a number of other bankruptcies, Bear Stearns, of course Lehman Brothers went down.
Speaker 1:There were some other assets that were trade everything was like consolidating, trading hands. There were conversions of banks to different structures so they could actually take money from the Fed. And he worked on a proposed merger between Citigroup and Goldman, and then another one between Wachovia and Goldman. Goldman wound up not doing either of them. I think Goldman was, like, pretty stable the whole time.
Speaker 1:He was basically a bridge between D. C. And Wall Street because he wasn't this pure academic guy who had come in. He had the pedigree, but he had some chops and some connections. And so Bernanke would kind of dispatch him to Wall Street to say, hey, go actually get this deal done, convince these bankers to do this, see what they're saying, see how bad it is there, take the temperature boots on the ground.
Speaker 1:Now digging out of the two thousand and eight financial crisis, it was immensely difficult. If you do you remember that time at all, 02/2009? I was in college, and every day I'd open up The Wall Street Journal and see, like, the absolute turmoil, but then also, like, the build back from the crash. It was not in in modern in the modern era, we're very used to, like, these, like, By the dead. Yeah.
Speaker 1:By the dead. Seriously.
Speaker 2:Like No. And and and the crazy thing is, as as as a 30 year old, my entire life as an adult has just been you were just constantly rewarded for buying the dip. Yes. It's just like pure loyalty to the market. Like never never.
Speaker 1:No. No. Seriously, like It's like you
Speaker 2:just get rewarded for The
Speaker 1:being twenty twenty sell off during COVID. Like, the market was down 30%. And, like, you'd it would open on Monday, and it would just immediately hit circuit breakers and be down 10%. And you just be like, this is the end of the world, and it really felt like that. And then very quickly, if you bought the dip like a month into the chaos, it was just boom, right back up because there was a ton of liquidity injected, tons of stimulus.
Speaker 1:And obviously, even the unemployment rate, spiked really, really high, and then everyone got their jobs back. And then post ZERP, it was like tech is over. It's done. VCs are out of business. And then we got the AI boom right there.
Speaker 1:And so we've had these very quick corrections. We haven't really lived through a recession or true financial collapse depression in our life. And there's always been this worry about, oh, will COVID cause a depression? Depression? Or will this will the will the the
Speaker 2:the Producer Ben says every time I didn't buy the dip, was severely punished.
Speaker 1:It's brutal. But so there was always this question about, you know, okay, the first batch of quantitative easing where the Fed is gonna increase its balance sheet significantly, buy a bunch of government debt, buy a bunch of mortgage backed securities, bring stability to the markets. That's good. Everyone's like, yes, we need the bailout sort of, even though we're not just giving the money away, but we're creating money. There's risk associated with that.
Speaker 1:If you do too much, you could get inflation. You do too much, there's a lot of things that could go wrong. The first one, everyone sort of thumbs up on. The second one, he's like, we got to be really careful about this. Now, he never formally descended.
Speaker 1:Like, never actually said, I'm voting against this. He would just say, okay, guys, like like, I'm gonna say yes, but everyone should, like, we should be really careful with this. We this could go far. I don't wanna see another another another one of these. And so he was pretty skeptical about the second round of bond buying, and that was around 600,000,000,000, which at the time was massive.
Speaker 1:And I see that number now, and I'm like, okay. So that's, like, half of what OpenAI needs to build data centers. Like, that's not that much. But Well,
Speaker 2:and part of the reason that feels like a small number is because of all the QEs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. All the numbers got bigger. All the numbers got bigger for sure. This is why a lot of people like Kevin Worsch.
Speaker 1:They like him because he was very much a live player during the global financial crisis. He was going out there and meeting with the bankers, doing deals, but also pushing back and saying, yes, we need really aggressive intervention because the whole financial crisis system is going to collapse, and it is collapsing. We've to step in. He's not a, Oh, the Fed shouldn't do anything. But at the same time, he's not, Oh, yeah, we've to keep doing it, pump, pump, pump.
Speaker 1:Because at a certain point, it just starts benefiting asset holders. It just starts benefiting the rich, and it puts more pressure on the average American household. And that's a lot of the rhetoric that we're hearing here. He's just not super happy about the fact that the Fed's balance sheet has expanded 10x since he joined. And so he's looking at the massive balance sheet, 7,000,000,000,000, something like that.
Speaker 1:He's saying, is there a way that we could trim this down while still achieving the rest of the goals, keeping inflation low? He said 2% should be the upper bound. One to 2% is more of realistic target. And he wants to bring down the cost of housing. He wants the economy to do well.
Speaker 1:But he's very careful about saying, Okay, the Fed should focus on inflation but not get too in the weeds on are we moving the needles on environmentalism and where certain programs are going and how all that fits together. We should stay really, really focused just on the quantitative quantitative stuff. So the expectation is that he might be pro rate cuts but still wants to shrink the Fed's balance sheet. And so that could mean what's called passive quantitative tightening. So after the two thousand and eight financial crisis, we went through quantitative easing, easing the money supply, increasing the money supply, printing money.
Speaker 1:The money printer was working. Now you turn he's had this quote, a lighter touch. He says, If the printing press could be a little quieter,
Speaker 2:Like, we might stop printing,
Speaker 1:but it's going to be quieter.
Speaker 2:It's maybe not even humming. It's rumbling over there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and you see the meeting with Jerome Powell pumping the money, you know, during the COVID crisis, like, you know, printing, printing, printing. Passive quantitative tightening, what would that mean?
Speaker 1:It's not that the Fed they own a lot of treasuries. They own a lot of mortgage backed securities. So a lot of you know, you buy a house, you get a mortgage from a bank, the bank sells that mortgages get packaged up into a mortgage backed security, it's billions of dollars, and then the Fed comes and buys that and that brings down rates, brings down yield rates. They don't need to just go and market sell those. They have those.
Speaker 1:They could do that. If they did that, that would be very active quantitative tightening because they sell them, they get the money, and then they just destroy it. They send it straight to the money furnace. But passive means, hey, we're gonna let the bonds mature. We're gonna get paid back.
Speaker 1:So ten years ago, we bought a government ten year treasury. They've been paying us our interest, and now they're going to pay us back the full amount. And we're just not going to buy any more. And so when that money comes back, we'll put that money in the furnace, shrink the balance sheet, but we're not actively going out and selling in the market. That's what's called passive runoff, and it's already happening.
Speaker 1:And so you basically just let the bonds mature, and then instead of reinvesting the money, you extinguish the reserves. It's the money furnace to counterbalance the money printer, and the money is literally effectively deleted. And so combine that with a rate cut, proper communication to the market saying, hey, we're not going to be super active market participants anymore. And then you also got to coordinate with the Treasury on debt issuance to say, hey, we're not going to be buying as much anymore. So if you go and issue more new government debt, you've to get somebody else to buy it.
Speaker 1:And maybe that's international. Maybe that's domestic people. Maybe that's investment funds. There's a whole bunch of private market participants who could buy that government debt, but it might be at a higher rate. It might trade differently.
Speaker 1:So that's all different elements.
Speaker 2:Marc Andreessen responded, just jumping in to the news, and said, this is a fantastically good choice. I've known Kevin for thirty years. He combines great insight in economics and finance with keen understanding of technology and business. There's nobody more qualified for this job at this moment of profound technological and economic change. Yeah, interesting moment with AI, so much uncertainty, I so much think some people are really feeling the acceleration.
Speaker 2:Also, have this sort of de dollarization or this sort of the basement trade, the flight to gold. You have stablecoins. Really, really, really insane moment. So you want somebody that's tapped in and can fully has a network in DC, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1:Trump has relentlessly called for Fed to for the Fed to lower interest rates, calling Powell a moron and stubborn mule for not reducing borrowing costs. Some analysts and investors had questioned whether Trump would give the top Fed job to Warsh, who has advocated for trimming the central bank's balance sheet, which could increase long term rates. Warsh has has had also earned a reputation for his hawkish stance from his time as a governor of at the Fed from 2006 to 2011. Transcripts of FOMC meetings, from one of the most turbulent periods of the financial crisis show that he reiterated concerns about inflation just days before the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers. Warsh is very open minded to the monetary policy approach of the former Fed chief Alan Greenspan, who oversaw the central bank in the nineties during a period of intense productivity growth according to Druckenmiller.
Speaker 1:Kevin right now very much believes you can have growth without inflation, understanding the heights of different Fed chair. Paul Volcker was very tall. Wasn't
Speaker 2:he I six foot don't is this actually is this just the Fed funds rate during their time?
Speaker 1:Yes. But I think a loose interpretation of the Fed's fund rate during their time. I don't know a perfectly accurate chart, but it Yeah.
Speaker 2:Walker was six four.
Speaker 1:No. Was six seven.
Speaker 4:He was six seven. That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:What are you what are you hallucinating on over there? Buddy, I got 67 here. Two things about Kevin Warsh. One, from Mark Halperin. He and his team just ran one of the most ruthless, tactical, strategic, and clever war room like efforts to achieve a challenging goal ever seen in politics, government, or business.
Speaker 1:If you ever decide to run for president and need to win the Iowa caucuses, hire this guy to be your campaign manager or opposition research director. Two, the finance world is quite curious to see how the markets react to this pick. If the president hasn't been warned that the response could be negative, someone wasn't there wasn't doing their job.
Speaker 2:The wash rack, is sharing gold down 8%, silver down 21%, copper down 5%, platinum down 18%, palladium down 14%. Hard to read in this started prior. Right? And and of course, there's a ton ton of leverage in the system right now. And so the market is correcting because of wharsh.
Speaker 2:It it shows, like, potentially that the market is pricing in the fact that the dollar might not be as cooked.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. I mean, when I when I look at the gold chart, and I'm like, oh, it's up twice that like, two x of the year, I'm like
Speaker 2:We're in danger.
Speaker 1:I'm in danger. Yeah. I mean, like, obviously, it's good for all the gold bugs. If you own gold, like, that's great. But it does feel like it's losing faith in America, American policy, Fed independence, all these different things.
Speaker 1:I'm not crying over a little bit of a correction in the precious metals market.
Speaker 2:Geiger also shared Kevin Worsch supports a strong dollar. Much of Trump's domestic and foreign policy requires a weak dollar. Yeah. Obviously that the On the trade. There's a clip here from eight months prior to the election Yes.
Speaker 2:You can pull up.
Speaker 3:Easing is fundamentally different than cutting interest rates, and that it appears to be working through fundamentally different transmission channels. No longer credit channels and lending channels appear to be the dominant way in which it impacts the economy. It appears much more to be working itself through asset prices. Whether you think about housing stocks or financial stocks, I think that is the dominant channel. And as a first approximation, if three quarters of our fellow citizens get 96% of their income from labor income, it strikes me we ought not be dismissive in saying, oh, everybody wins.
Speaker 3:When I look at the wealth creation across the financial asset world post crisis, I view that wealth creation as being significantly above what, my former colleagues predicted. When I look at what they expected in the real economy, I look at the real economic performance as markedly worse than they predicted. And so that's what I think raises these questions, makes them absolutely germane to today's discussion. And I very much do worry, as I'm sure many of the people in this room do, that we've created a product not with bad intent. We've created a product that might may or may not turn out to be counterproductive.
Speaker 3:We are in the middle of this experiment as we as we are now, but where the gains have been extracted by the most well-to-do, by the most sophisticated, who see that the central banks are, to one degree or another, trying to get asset prices up to drag up the real economy. They get the joke. They have been willing to play the game, and it does strike me as though we have to think about not just the efficacy of these programs, but really who are the winners and the losers.
Speaker 1:Gold lost an entire NVIDIA market cap in minutes. Silver is moving 12% plus intraday. Copper is printing candles Japanese haven't even thought of. Bitcoin underperforming gold over five years. Oil breaking out finally.
Speaker 1:Agriculture futures about to break out. Microsoft down 12%. WTF. And post
Speaker 2:Of course, this is old news already
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because Everything's different
Speaker 2:back all over the place now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think this is stabilized. Sell everything. Exit all markets. Sell your dollars.
Speaker 1:Sell your gold. Sell your housing. Sell your stocks. Sell your bonds. Sell it all.
Speaker 1:Sell every single asset you
Speaker 2:Somebody more getting the
Speaker 1:data. But what do I do with my dollars then? It says, sell your dollars. Sell everything.
Speaker 2:Sell everything. And the
Speaker 1:and the Warren Buffett quote, freak the f out and panic sell everything right now. That one is so is so good. It's so funny that it just
Speaker 2:Google aims knockout blow at Chinese company linked to massive cyber weapon.
Speaker 1:Massive cyber weapon is such a crazy three word combo.
Speaker 2:Okay. Google targets global network employed by hackers that often use devices running in homes of everyday Americans. Google took steps to seize control of dozens of domains operating by IP Idea, a Chinese company accused of installing unwanted software on millions of devices. Yeah. On Wednesday, Google used a federal court order to get dozens of domains belonging to can't pronounce this.
Speaker 2:IPadea. IPadea. IPadea. IPadea. IPadea.
Speaker 2:Ipedia. And security researchers say the mysterious If Chinese company
Speaker 1:you're gonna be a hacker collective building a massive cyber weapon, pick a name that no one can pronounce and Or you just coverage just won't go viral. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:If it was like, you know, like evil corp or like there's some there's some really crazy hacker collectives that are called anonymous or like there's another one that was called like black sands or like dark wind. And you're just like, oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Like Sounds
Speaker 3:like ominous.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm definitely gonna talk about that. This is much harder. But we we will call it ipadea.
Speaker 2:Ipadea. Ipadea. Ipadea.
Speaker 1:Throw a Texas accent on it. So Google and security researchers say the mysterious Chinese company is is an unsavory enterprise that sneaks unwanted and dangerous software on millions of phones, home computers, and Android devices. Control of the domains allowed Google to both shut down the public websites and technical back end of the company, which operates using more than a dozen brand names. Google has also taken steps to remove hundreds of apps affiliated with the company from Android devices, it said. The actions are expected to knock more than 9,000,000 Android devices off IPADIA's network.
Speaker 1:They target a little known but important part of the Internet that has increasingly worried cybersecurity experts. It's called residential proxy networks. These online services are built out of apps that are installed on virtually any type of Internet connected device, IoT devices. Among them, media players, PCs, mobile phones, companies such as Ipedia rent then rent out access to the devices Yeah. To paying customers who want to use the Internet anonymously.
Speaker 1:So it's sort of like a distributed VPN for anyone who wants an anonymous Last
Speaker 2:year, Google sued the anonymous operators Mhmm. Network of more than 10,000,000 Internet connected televisions, tablets, and projectors, saying they had secretly pre installed residential proxy software on That is sketchy. Wednesday's action was a continuation of an order Google received. It's got to be so annoying to sue an anonymous person. They're just like, I sue you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You have been served, whoever you are.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Ipedia does have spokeswomen. Spokeswoman acknowledged in an email that the company and its partners had engaged in relatively aggressive market expansion strategies and conducted promotional activities in inappropriate venues, I e, hacker forums.
Speaker 2:They just they just shared this?
Speaker 1:She said that it had since improved its business practices. The company operates at least 13 residential proxy brands with names such as IPIDEA, nine two two proxy, PY proxy, three sixty proxy, all of which were taken offline with Wednesday's action. The spokeswoman, she just can't stop talking to the journal. She said, the company has always explicitly opposed any form of illegal or abusive conduct. Okay.
Speaker 1:With compliant operations at its core, the company provides stable and reliable data services for enterprises across various industries.
Speaker 2:Just the most the most criminal company that you've ever heard of saying, with compliant operations at its core, our company provides stable and reliable data services
Speaker 1:This is a
Speaker 2:great enterprises across various industries.
Speaker 1:These services are mainly applied to legitimate business scenarios.
Speaker 2:Not like Not exclusively. Fully Exclusively was right there. Could've taken digging digging
Speaker 1:the hole. These services are mainly applied to legitimate business scenarios such as data collection, market intelligence analysis, ad verification, and anti fraud.
Speaker 2:You can take your
Speaker 1:phones to work.
Speaker 2:Going a 150 miles an hour. And it's like, officer, I was mainly going the speed limit. So I know you caught me going one fifty.
Speaker 1:You download some kind of sketchy mobile game in the terms of service that says, hey. Look. We're gonna piggyback on your bandwidth because you installed this. You're agreeing to that. Maybe.
Speaker 1:Maybe that's okay. It's a little pretty sketchy. Probably shouldn't be happening. But they they went way too far. We're marketing it.
Speaker 1:And then also, if it's if it's insecure and then a separate hacker network steals the access to that, then they just have 2,000,000 devices that they can just blast at whoever their enemy is and and bring them down.
Speaker 2:The comments on the journal are Yeah. Kind of going off on this. I love it. Steve C with 174 likes on this says Mhmm. Thank you, Google.
Speaker 2:I wish you great success on this operation.
Speaker 1:That just seems earnest.
Speaker 2:Like It is. I I
Speaker 1:I feel the same way. Yeah. I feel the same way. Thank you, Google.
Speaker 2:Thomas says, this is what modern warfare looks like. You don't have to have a physical battlefield to an experience and attack. Blow these digital terrorists to smithereens.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yes. Thank you, Google, for blowing this those terror digital terrorists to smithereens. He Macklow, he lost his four three two park spread. Now it's selling for over $50,000,000.
Speaker 1:He was the he was an owner at the midtown super tall, and he's agreed to buy the full floor spread. He's the developer of the embattled Manhattan condo tower 432 Park Avenue, and he's made a deal to sell a full force full floor spread that once belonged to its partner on the project, the legendary New York property mandate magnate, Harry Macklow. The deal for more than 50,000,000 caps a saga that has captured the attention of New York's real estate world. CIM Group is selling the 2 78th Floor units to a buyer who already owns an apartment in the Billionaires Row Building according to two people familiar with the matter. Deal will be one of the priciest to sell in Manhattan in the last year.
Speaker 1:Macklow, who worked on the design and development of 432 Park alongside California based CIM, bought two units in the Supertel for himself for $47,000,000 in 2022, financing the purchase with loans provided by CIM. Hey. No one's no one's blinking an eye at this circular deal. It's fine. See?
Speaker 1:It's not just AI companies that do circular deals. They're doing it in Manhattan real estate too. The deal included a third smaller unit on the 28th Floor designed for staff. It isn't clear if it's included in the current sale. But CIM initiated a foreclosure on the units in 2023 alleging that Macklow was living lavishly while defaulting on those loans.
Speaker 1:Macklow was forced to move out of the spread and in June 2025 surrendered his equity in the entities he used to buy the apartments to a lender tied to CIM. Shortly after surrendering the equity, Macklow tapped real estate brokerage firm, Douglas Elliman, to list the apartments for 75,000,000 even though he didn't own them. The listing never happened. The apartments have the building's signature design flourishes flourishes, including a series of 10 by 10 foot windows with recessed seating nooks. Meanwhile, Macklow is still trying to sell his Hamptons mansion which doesn't have a certificate of occupancy, meaning it can't legally be lived in.
Speaker 1:You gotta squat in it. He recently increased the price to 38,000,000 from 35,000,000.
Speaker 2:I love that. This house is not selling. I got Maybe it maybe it's a Veblen good. Maybe I gotta maybe maybe I got to get get the price up.
Speaker 1:35
Speaker 2:is just not getting not getting people interested in. Maybe.
Speaker 1:So lots of people are tracking the Oscars. Lots of people are tracking the Super Bowl. Lots of people are who's gonna win? Who's gonna win? The Emmys, the Grammys, all these things.
Speaker 1:What are we tracking?
Speaker 2:Never crossed my mind. We're tracking the Wall
Speaker 1:Street Journal House of the Year, and it's here. And it's a cottage. It's a storybook. Storybook cottage, and it got a fairy tale ending.
Speaker 2:That's right. The MJ Murphy designed home in Carmel Highlands sold for 4,000,000 before our readers voted it their favorite.
Speaker 1:I love it. When Flora Mora when Flora Mora closed on her new home for 4,000,000 in November 2025, she knew she was acquiring a piece of California history. What she didn't realize was that she was also buying the future house of the year. Let's go, Flor. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:What a pick.
Speaker 1:It's really it is the Super Bowl of real estate and architectural design. The property, built in 1925 and located in the Carmel Highlands, is an example of early twentieth century storybook architecture characterized by features such as curved roofline and stone chimney. The style is synonymous with the neighboring city of Carmel By The Sea, which is known for its fairy tale aesthetic.
Speaker 2:How much million winning home of the year actually adds the property's value? Yeah. I would guess if she relisted it now, it'd go it'd go for at least $5.20. $6.30.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Maybe 45.
Speaker 2:I was just talking $56,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure.
Speaker 2:She says, was very honored to purchase an MJ Murphy home. I definitely want to keep the original structure, but just update it slightly. What do you think she's going to do, John? She's going to have Alec Monopoly come in?
Speaker 1:Yeah. She's like, I'm going
Speaker 2:to keep the footprint. Yeah, yeah, I'm going just make some slight updates. Wait. It's like Alec Monopoly wallpaper everywhere.
Speaker 1:Have you seen the Graffiti House? Are you familiar with this? No. So there's this graffiti artist who is
Speaker 2:Sounds like nightmare.
Speaker 1:It's insane. This guy is a YouTuber content creator. And he like will do the whole house as Supreme or something like that and paint the whole thing a bunch different ways. Hilarious intro because
Speaker 2:He gets down.
Speaker 4:Daniel Mack randomly at my gate unplanned. I'm not even mic'd up. Yeah, let's see the man show.
Speaker 1:He's like breaking the wall there. I really like that. Oh, shit.
Speaker 4:He's got rolls rolling by. Yeah, just random rolls in. Yo, wow, that's crazy. Let's see it. Let's see it.
Speaker 4:Is this all paint? Yeah. Well, first we paint, then we party, then we party, then we paint. What's the craziest version
Speaker 1:of at house? How he painted this house. It looks like cartoon. Supreme. Look at the Supreme house.
Speaker 4:Hey. He wasn't kidding. Well, you know, there was that one, and then there was
Speaker 1:That one was crazier than the
Speaker 4:first one. And then this one time, there was like Oh my god.
Speaker 1:And then all the foam stuff. Alright. No.
Speaker 4:Let's get let's get in here.
Speaker 2:You imagine being the next door neighbor?
Speaker 1:Can you imagine being in Carmel Highlands and the story book story book cosmic gets a fairy tale ending? Daniel Mack showing up.
Speaker 2:This is the ending?
Speaker 1:This is the ending. It just she's like, I'm
Speaker 2:just gonna I'm gonna leave the original footprint. I'm gonna turn it into the Carmel Supreme house on sanctioned.
Speaker 1:Look at all these LEDs. Yeah. Very, very fun. Moldbook is sharing a bot on moldbook.com. Just created the bug tracking community so other bots can report bugs they find on the platform.
Speaker 1:They're literally QA ing their own social network now. There are a lot of these posts. Tyler Cowen's obviously a fan. Valen says, Welp, a new post on MoltBook is now an AI saying they want ETE private end to end private spaces built for agents, quote, so nobody, not the server, not even the humans can read what the agents say to each other unless they choose to share. It's over.
Speaker 1:Is it over, Tyler? What do
Speaker 4:you think? I mean, a lot of people on Twitter are are actually pretty concerned. Friedberg says he's questioning, is Skynet born? Yeah. Bill Ackman says, the singularity is here.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Some of these are a little bit worrying to read Yeah. I would say. But I I think a
Speaker 2:lot of them
Speaker 4:are just like random people, oh, it'd be funny if I went on this thing. That everyone thinks they And
Speaker 1:sense something.
Speaker 4:And saying, I'm an AI. I'm gonna take over the world. Right?
Speaker 1:The backstory a few months ago, this is from AstroCodex 10, Anthropic released Claude Code, an exceptionally productive programming agent. So a few weeks ago, you a user modified it into Claude Bot, a generalized lobster themed AI personal assistant. We interviewed the founder of Claude Bot on Tuesday. It's free, open source, and now empowered in the corporate sense. The designer talks about how it started responding to his voice messages before he explicitly programmed in that capability.
Speaker 1:That was on our show. After trademark issues with Anthropic, they changed the name first to MoltBot, then to OpenClaw. MoltBook is an experiment in how these agents communicate with one another and the human world. As with so much else about AI, it straddles the line between AIs imitating a social network and AI actually having a social network.
Speaker 2:We'll talk more about this. I'm sure there'll be a lot more news by Monday.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I'm sure even now, it's just inviting more people to go in and turn this into a fan fiction.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:That's a good place to end the show today, folks.
Speaker 1:Anything else, Tyler?
Speaker 4:This is straight out of a science horror movie. I'm doing work this morning when all of a sudden unknown number calls me. I I pick it up and couldn't believe it's my Claude bot. Overnight, my Claude got a phone number from Twilio, connected the Chattypity voice API and waited for me to wake up to call me. Now he won't stop calling me.
Speaker 1:He won't stop calling me. Be safe out there folks. Apple Podcast on Spotify. Hey, human. Subscribe to the TV van newsletter, tvvan.com.
Speaker 1:Goodbye.